IF EVERY DAY IS SPECIAL, MAYBE NO DAY REALLY IS
With all of the campaigns out there, the calendar is in chaos, says Randy Shore.
It can’t be an accident that National Hangover Day comes during New Year’s Resolutions Week. Can it?
So, how is it that International Coffee Day (Oct. 1) and Pi Day (March 14) are nearly six months apart? And what exactly is World Milk Day (June 1) doing four months before U.S. National Cookie Month (October)?
There are well over 1,500 special days, weeks and months and, frankly, it’s anarchy out there.
You can mount a campaign through social media channels at almost no cost, if you are clever enough to get your message shared.
“Obviously marketing people have caught on to this and that’s why we see Strawberry Ice Cream Day and Coffee Day,” said Lisa Cavanaugh, associate professor at the UBC Sauder School of Business.
But on social media we can all talk at once, and we do.
“Everyone can do this now and it’s a blessing and a curse,” she said. “It’s wonderful that people without resources can have a megaphone, but the downside is that everyone has a megaphone and they are all using them at once. People just feel inundated; you don’t know what to listen to. We just aren’t evolved enough to filter all that information.”
It used to be that just a few days on the calendar really mattered. Chanukah and Passover, check. Christmas and Easter, done.
But some of those days have been co-opted by commerce.
“Special days aren’t so special anymore,” Cavanaugh said.
“The modern version of Santa Claus as we see him in seasonal displays or school classrooms was largely shaped by the Coca-Cola Company, even though Christmas obviously has religious roots as well,” she said.
Sinterklaas is the historical template for Santa Claus, but he wasn’t a jolly old elf. Europe’s 19th-century Santa often had a black-face sidekick and carried a birch rod for beating naughty children.
“He was very mean, really,” she said. “He could play some nasty tricks on you. He wasn’t jolly or just eating cookies.”
Greeting card companies — Hallmark, American Greetings — made Valentine’s Day the often-painful obligation it is today.
“They actually made people feel like they were doing something wrong if they didn’t participate,” Cavanaugh said.
Designating special awareness days is a time-honoured practice, though it used to be something only governments did.
Black History Month (February) was first declared as an awareness week in 1926, celebrated in the United States and Canada. National Maple Syrup Day (Dec. 17) came much later, and it is also observed on both sides of the border.
Health- and disease-related awareness days have been with us for decades and help focus attention on fundraising campaigns. The Heart and Stroke Foundation runs Stroke Awareness Month (June) and Heart Month (February), but there are dozens of others.
“It can be challenging to be heard, there are so many special days,” said Kelly Puddister, national program manager for the Canadian AIDS Society.
In the AIDS community alone, there’s Aboriginal AIDS Awareness Week (Dec. 1-5), the AIDS Walk (Sept. 15), AIDS Awareness Week (usually the last week of November) and World AIDS Day (Dec. 1). While cancer causes are still very focused on raising money for research, World AIDS Day has transitioned into more of a memorial to the people we’ve lost to illness.
“We get a good amount of coverage for World AIDS Day — we just had our 30th year — but there’s also AIDS Awareness Week and that doesn’t get much publicity at all,” she said. “It’s only known to people who are involved in the community, as opposed to the general public.”
While some non-profits are able to use social media to their advantage, HIV/AIDS remains a serious subject that doesn’t lend itself to fun tag-your-friend-style hijinks.
“With breast cancer you have all the NFL players wearing pink sneakers, but with AIDS not as many people want to be associated with it,” she said.
On Jan. 7, the Alzheimer Society of Canada will kick off its annual month-long awareness campaign, said Rossanne Meandro, director of communications.
“There’s a lot more noise in the marketplace, it’s very cluttered, so it’s become increasingly challenging,” she said. “And that doesn’t just apply to awareness, it matters when we are fundraising as well. How do you stand out from the crowd?”
The calendar provides the society with a number of other opportunities to get their message out.
U.S. Alzheimer’s Awareness Month is November, while World Alzheimer’s Month and World Alzheimer’s Day are in September.
The society also piggybacks on related events such as Brain Health Awareness Week (Oct. 15-19), Heart Month, National Hospice Palliative Care Week (May 6-12) and National Carers Day (April 3).
“New special days seem to pop up all the time, so we try to leverage those as best we can,” Meandro said.
“Each of those is an opportunity to tell a different piece of the story.”
Events such as organized runs, office raffles and bake sales that are often associated with awareness days also foster a sense of community, Cavanaugh said.
Goofy special days like Pi Day, Star Wars Day and Dress up Your Pet Day do the same thing on social media, she said.
“I think there’s value in the shared experience of celebration, no matter what the reason,” she said.
“It’s something to look forward to and bond over, even if it’s over ice cream. Maybe your neighbour is super psyched about National Strawberry Ice Cream Day (Jan. 15).”
“We’ve disconnected from each other with the rise of technology, so any experience you share with real people goes in the plus column.”
(Social media’s) downside is that everyone has a megaphone and they are all using them at once.